Close to 100 years ago, T. F. Tout was able to claim in his magisterial six-volume study of England’s letter-writing offices that the administrative history of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England was "largely unwritten.” Within the last ten or twenty years, however, historians have undertaken socio-cultural studies of medieval bureaucracy and its personnel, moving from prosopographical and biographical sketches to nuanced examinations of the experience and challenges of bureaucratic employment throughout Europe.

In typical college classrooms, instructors face large groups of highly diverse students. In fact, students are often so diverse that even their diversity is diverse. Differences in educational background, family support systems, English-language proficiency, abilities and disabilities, and more, can strongly impact students' capacities to fulfill course expectations.

But while "differentiation" has become a pervasive buzzword within K-12 pedagogy, in higher education it remains unclear exactly how, where, when, and whose responsibility it is to engage and support students with various learning challenges.